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Ratliff is one of the co-authors of Safe: the Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.[2] His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists," written for The New Yorker in 2005,[3] was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.[4]

Ratliff conducted an experiment by vanishing as far as knowledge of his physical whereabouts.[5] Wired offered a $5000 reward for anyone who could find him.[6] During the experiment, he was still "on the grid" and communicating with his followers on Twitter.[7] The Google Wave development group has proposed using the phenomenal ploy as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity.[8]NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology [9] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag. Ratliff used his specially created blog to taunt the "hunters",[10] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him [11] and other groups formed to help him remain at large [12] He was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[13]

Ratliff left a coded message [14] FaLiLV/tRD:aN/HA:aSaTS; TW—tRS/tEKAA/tBotV; FSF—TItN/tGG/tCCoBB; JC—LJ/HoD/aOoP; JM—JGS/MWS/tBotH; which has been translated to the authors and titles of books.